Recommendations based on "Marie Antoinette, Phantom Queen"

'June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support'. In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a 'secret annexe', fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, this is the definitive edition of the diary of Anne Frank.

Mary Seacole is now known for her medical work in the Crimean war, and as a brilliant woman who combated the racial prejudice she experienced in her lifetime. But for a long time her story was lost.From growing up in Kingston, Jamaica as the daughter of a doctress to helping soldiers in the war, discover the details of the amazing life that Mary Seacole led in this beautifully illustrated book with real-life stories, timelines and facts.

In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. The monetary value is estimated at over half a billion dollars. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity?The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and frank interviews, Felch and Frammolino give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum and tell the story of the Getty’s dealings in the illegal antiquities trade. The outlandish characters and bad behavior could come straight from the pages of a thriller—the wealthy recluse founder, the cagey Italian art investigator, the playboy curator, the narcissist CEO—but their chilling effects on the rest of the art world have been all too real, as the authors show in novelistic detail.Fast-paced and compelling, Chasing Aphrodite exposes the layer of dirt beneath the polished façade of the museum business.

A riveting look inside a life of poverty, success, and the inner circles of political influence--from the foothills of Appalachia all the way to the White House.New York Times bestselling ghostwriter Nancy French is coming out of the shadows to tell her own incredible story.Nancy's family hails from the foothills of the Appalachians, where life was dominated by coal mining, violence, abuse, and poverty. Longing for an adventure, she married a stranger, moved to New York, and dropped out of college. In spite of her lack of education, she found success as a ghostwriter for conservative political leaders. However, when she was unwilling to endorse an unsuitable president, her allies turned on her and she found herself spiritually adrift, politically confused, and occupationally unemployable.Republicans mocked her, white nationalists targeted her, and her church community alienated her. But in spite of death threats, sexual humiliation, and political ostracization, she learned the importance of finding her own voice--and that the people she thought were her enemies could be her closest friends.A poignant and engrossing memoir filled with humor and personal insights, Ghosted is a deeply American story of change, loss, and ultimately love.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: O Magazine, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Seattle Times The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.  Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.

"A touching three-dimensional portrait of the Polish-born scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner" (Kirkus) Madame Curie, the discoverer of radium and radioactivityOne hundred years ago, Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, for which she won the Nobel Prize in physics. In 1911 she won an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for isolating new radioactive elements. Despite these achievements, or perhaps because of her fame, she has remained a saintly, unapproachable genius. From family documents and a private journal only recently made available, Susan Quinn at last tells the full human story. From the stubborn sixteen-year-old studying science at night while working as a governess, to her romance and scientific partnership with Pierre Curie-an extraordinary marriage of equals-we feel her defeats as well as her successes: her rejection by the French Academy, her unbearable grief at Pierre's untimely and gruesome death, and her retreat into a love affair with a married fellow scientist, causing a scandal which almost cost her the second Nobel Prize. In Susan Quinn's fully dimensional portrait, we come at last to know this complicated, passionate, brilliant woman.

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. Its prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil--gifted, wealthy, and bored--form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game. And they play this game with such wit and style that it is impossible not to admire them, until they discover mysterious rules that they cannot understand. In the ensuing battle there can be no winners, and the innocent suffer with the guilty.This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able to judge whether the novel is as "diabolical" and "infamous" as its critics have claimed, or whether it has much to tell us about a world we still inhabit.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY • ONE OF ESQUIRE’S BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. But, hidden behind General Dumas's swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: he was the son of a black slave—who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas made his way to Paris, where he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution—until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat. The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. TIME magazine called The Black Count "one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moment that made it possible." But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it.

In the context of nineteenth-century Victorinoir and close readings of original-cycle film noir, Julie Grossman argues that the presence of the "femme fatale" figure, as she is understood in film criticism and popular culture, is drastically over-emphasized and has helped to sustain cultural obsessions with "bad" women.